Impact Of Meditation On Energetics and Human Potential

Hemal Patel, PhD

Good to be here, Tom.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So take us through your journey. You have a very traditional background and, and medicine and your, you teach in a medical school and part of research and, and medicine. How the heck did you come from that? And get to where you are now, you still do that. But how did you get to where you are now where you have this interest in studying meditation and energy?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I double majored in college so I was a biology major because I knew that would pay the bills and I get a job and then just to piss my parents off, I got a degree in philosophy and religion. This was the initial exposure to thinking outside the box and, and really far off kind of theological and other sort of ways of, of looking at the world. And not really the biological, empirical way of looking at things, right, more thought based versus the experimental phase. I practiced some meditation when I was in college and then life catches up with you and you get busy and you forget all about it. I’m the only PhD in a family of MD. So all of the kids are physicians and I decided that that was sort of the path that I wanted to not go down and, and really do creative experimental kinds of things. For 20 years, my lab has been focused on looking at the structure of membranes and how specific proteins within that membrane, adapt the cell to stress. And most of that focus has been how the cell uses the membrane as a way to change energetic potential, using mitochondria to then really adapt to aging cardiovascular diseases, neurological diseases. 

At the end of the day, everything comes down to this balance of energy, right? How much can make and how much do you utilize? And it’s the really fine balance of this that creates this potential for life and longevity and all these things. About 2.5-3 years ago, a guy shared an office with for about 10 years at the V A hospital who was a pain physician, had left and started his own pain clinic. And with the opioid crisis, he started experimenting with alternative ways to manage pain. And one of them was meditation and he met Joe Dispenza and he was at an event and he saw some crazy amazing stuff said we need to study this. And Joe of course, said, I know and Toby’s guy. So I’m the guy. And so that’s how I got roped into doing some of these things. And it started off pretty slow. But, you know, over two years, we’ve gone through this mega mega sort of exploratory phase. We’ve generated some absolutely amazing data around how meditation in the mind ultimately affects the body in ways to, to really think about in new ways the potential of, of unlocking what the human body can do.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I love this. This is so beautiful that we have you on our summit because we have energy healers. We have lots of people that are doing this work, but we don’t have somebody except for you that’s actually doing the research to prove That it does work and how it works. So this is really cool. So you say, you said the journey has been kind of slow? What do you mean by that?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Well, it’s slow because I have my other 20 year life, but it’s also slow because I was very skeptical. Right? I mean, the notion is that you close your eyes for X number of hours at a retreat. I mean, it’s 35 hours when you’re at a week long retreat or you do this a couple times a day, some short, about most of these experienced meditators are meditating an hour and a half, two hours a day. Think about what this means, right? You close your eyes and think about nothing for two hours and your body gets better. The scientists, you’re like, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I mean, months to get to the point of saying, all right, we need to look at these samples and see what’s changed. And so we did our first event in February of 2020. Everyone knows what happened in March of 2020. So that was sort of a low because of the pandemic as well. We had these samples sitting around and we really didn’t know how to start looking at them. You know, science is expensive. We had a little bit of funding to do some basic kinds of assays. And we ran this really simple assay to look at the number of particles that were floating around in the plasma isolated from different types of meditators. We had controls, they’re basically relaxation control so that they’re at an event doing nothing but sitting at the pool, drinking Mai Tais, whatever they’re doing. We had new meditators, we call them the novice meditators. So these are individuals that have never been to a live event. 

And this is their first live event and they don’t really meditate as a part of their life. Most of them have started exploring this in the last couple of months kind of thing in their lifestyle. And then we have the experienced meditators that meditate every day. They’ve been to multiple live Joe dispenser retreats. And this is a core part of who they are and what they want their existence to be. And when we did this first analysis, we noticed that the markers in the plasma, the blood plasma of these experienced meditators were drastically different than the controls and the novice individuals. In seven days, we’re starting to see up regulation of some of these things. And so I get really excited because now you’re like, well, there’s an actual change, right? There’s a measurable difference between the blood of a person sitting at the pool all day versus someone who does this day in day out. I would have liked to have been there with you when you first saw that research for me and then like, hey, wait a minute, what is this? No, it was not. 

I mean, the postdoc came over and said, you gotta come see this. And so, and then, you know, we were blinded. So we didn’t know what the groups were. Then when we finally got the un blinded sort of code and we were able to fiddle this out. It turns out that it was the experience group that was seeing this major effect. And now we’ve gone on this deep dive, figuring out what actually happens and what are the factors that change? And then we can talk in a little bit about sort of where the research is headed. We’re looking at just about anything that comes out of a human, we’re measuring both physiologically as well as biologically to make these connections come together.

Tom McCarthy

And so when you said particles were different in the plasma of experienced meditators versus people sitting by the pool, what types of things were showing up? And what was the impact of those things on, on our biology?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So the initial thing we looked at this, this machine called in nanoscience. So basically looks at particle sizes within a small amount of plasma. So you put a couple of microliters of plasma in it uses brownie emotions to describe content as well as size. And so the things that everyone’s into these days are exercise, right? Get a $10,000 injection of an ex system and it will cure every ill. You have that sort of the pitch that people is a precursor to a stem cell or what? So, an X system is basically a piece of a cell membrane that’s come off. So for decades, people thought this was just biological garbage, right? Things slipped off and they get sort of excreted out and actually taken out of the system turns out that that garbage is not garbage cells release factors and they package them with DNA, RNA, proteins, metabolites, all kinds of things that then float around from your brain cells or heart cells, whatever cell that’s shooting these off and they have the ability to go to other cells in the body, engage and change the genetic program, the makeup of the cell, the behavior of the disease, enhanced disease. 

So they do a lot of things, right? So they have content in them and there’s a particular size. And so what we noticed in these experienced and novice meditators is there’s this spike in the size of particle that represents exorcisms because we’re really excited. And so we haven’t gone much further on the exorcism description, we just know that there’s more of them, but then we started looking at other things in the blood. So one of the other areas were very interested in our metabolites, right. So every cell excretes metabolite functions as a consequence of energy utilization and generation. 

Your gut microbiome releases these metabolites as well. And this is a way to influence the extra cellular milieu that your cells are based in. When we look at this in control novice and experienced individuals, you see this explosion of metabolites after a week long experience in novice individuals experience individuals compared to the controls. So everything about your biology changes and we can record it at the level of the blood. The question now is we’re trying to figure out what that means, right? There’s a 1500, things that change. But is there a purpose and a sort of a method to this? I think we’re gonna uncover and we have some early evidence of this is that there may be four or five nodal hubs that get elevated, that may be the key regulators of these processes. And we’re in the process of trying to discover that.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So did it make you start meditating again once you saw these?

Hemal Patel, PhD

I mean, it took, you know, took Joe Dispensa a year to convince me to come to a week long event. But I finally went and I was floored. I mean, I was not expecting to see that level of change in my, it was really, it was an immersive experience. I had, I went in completely not knowing what to expect, which is how most people should go in. I mean, if you have this expectation, you create this bias. And so I went in not knowing anything about it and just poured myself into the experience, sort of blended in with the crowd and just went about my business and did it. And I mean, I can’t explain what happened during that week. I mean, I cried like the whole week more than I’ve ever. It was cathartic, right? I mean, you go through this introspection of who and what you are and you really change and evolve that process and it was, it was defining, it was, it was an event I did not expect to happen the way it did. \And so we’ve, we really, and, and being in that immersive experience, I got hundreds of thousands of ideas about how to evolve some of the research to look at more deeper things that we’re interested in?

Tom McCarthy

Very cool. And is there an optimal amount of time that you’re seeing through your research that amount of time that we need to meditate in a day to get these nice changes you’re talking about?

Hemal Patel, PhD

We’ll eventually get to that. I think one of, yeah, I noticed with the week long event is I got home and my wife’s like, you seem really different. I’m like, right. And she’s like, you seem really calm and less reactive. So she tried to stress me the whole week to try to normal, it didn’t happen. And so then about three months in, she’s like, I think you need to go to another retreat. So it individuals, there is this component of, you have to create this lifestyle. My busy schedule, it’s just hard to meditate every day. 

But I plucked to hundreds of people that when they leave and they really incorporate this into their fabric of who they are. This is a sustainable thing. And for most of them, it’s not a chore habit. This really becomes the most enjoyable part of their day to spend an hour and a half, two hours on themselves. Right? And it really makes more productive, more engaged, more active, more sort of part of their present world.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And is there’s different types of meditation. So I learned transcendental meditation many, many years ago. And then, like you, I did it for a little while and then didn’t do it for a long time. And now I’m a meditator, but I have different methodologies. There’s active meditation like  silver mind control where you’re actually visualizing things. Is there, are you in your research, are you finding for the purposes of generating the exorcisms and metabolites and things like that? Is there one meditation that you’re studying or is it different types? And are there different results based on what you do?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So you know, we’re exclusively looking at Joe Dispenza meditations as well. Funding is driven, we will eventually incorporate prayer, other meditative practices and other things, Harrison. So the focus currently is on Joe’s process and trying to define what’s happening at those events. I think meditation is a loose word that people use to describe lots of things. It’s something that resonates and, and people can relate to. I think if you use that word 20 years ago, people would think you’re crazy and nuts and you’re kind of thing now, it’s mainstream and everyone accepts it. 

What I think Joe and others that push the extreme are doing is that they’ve left meditation behind and, but there isn’t a word yet that defines what they’ve left behind and what they’re doing. And it’s really trying to define and fill that gap that we’re sort of playing in right now. And we have ways to look at deep structural functional changes in the brain and then how they correlate to the body changes at the blood level and it does not look like traditional meditation. So headspace and calm app things won’t do it. I think there has to be a level of engagement that you are in this contemplated state where you use meditation as a way to, to focus your mind to really get to something that’s more religious, right? Is more of a mystical experience that, that these aesthetics and others have that go spend time in the desert and just escape the world. 

Yet Joe can teach you how to do this in the comfort of your home in an hour. And these week long events are, are really sort of a way to expand your mind to do this very quickly. The FMRI data we have right now suggests that what these people are doing during this week long event, what they can achieve is something that, that looks like they’re on psilocybin or some other plant medicine that creates this decision without being on any of these things, expanding your mind to be able to do this. And it’s really to sort of think about your future without having the baggage of your past. I think in all of this, it’s a restructuring the brain and how it sees the future.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I love what you just said. Think about the future without what did you say something about the past, without baggage of the past,

Hemal Patel, PhD

The past, constantly thinking about our future type, past experiences we’ve had and the expected outcomes that those have led to. And these are these memories that get trapped in our head. And so keep us from doing new things because we’re like, well, I know that’s not gonna work. So why should I do it again? But I think what these experiences teach you is to live in the present moment to then take those chances over and over again to expect that unexpected future.

Tom McCarthy

I love that I love that. Talk about the impact of meditation on the brain. You brought that up a little bit that you’re saying you’ve got research on that. But what happens in the brain when somebody meditates?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So, you know, I trained as a cardiovascular pharmacologist. I know that there’s something that exists up here, but the most important thing in my life has been here. Right. 

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Hemal Patel, PhD

And the heart there is a component of that I think a lot of these meditative practices experience thought is what we think originates here, but the emotional feeling we all think originates here, but it’s they’re connected, right? And so a lot of our studies look at how heart and brain connect. A lot of Joe’s meditations focus on the synchronization of the heart and the brain. And this is really when those two things, the thinking part of your brain and the emotional part of your body coalesces when you have these mega changes in your life, the studies we’ve so now I’m starting to become more of a neuroscience person, right? I’m reading some books on E E G and things like that. You’re trained as a scientist, you’re taught to be able to learn other fields. 

And so I’m learning that, that just like the heart, the brain has electrical activity and we can measure it. And so we’re starting to do these at these events and that, that we’re looking at surface level activity with these caps that you have, you know, 31 channels. And then because we like the heart, we sacrifice one of those channels and we actually look at the electrocardiogram. So we’re looking at the ECG at the same time, we’re doing EEG measurements. And so now you’re, you can measure subtle changes in heart electrical activity that then couple the global changes in brain activity. And what we’re seeing is that there is the meditative experience leads to changes that are global and different networks get activated in your brain. We’re now able to show that those things correlate to things that happen deeper in your brain through FMRI imaging as well. And so there is this conglomerate of what an emotional intensive experience does during meditation. We’re doing crazy far out studies with twins where we bring twins into the events, they’re allowed to meditate together. And then during key parts of the week, we separate them and we let one of them meditate in the room. 

It’s always the same one. We have the other one leave the room and they listen to some really boring documentary brain map them at the same time. And it’s amazing that the one that’s having this intense emotional experience is able to impart that behavior in terms of the brain activity to the twin that’s listening to a documentary that shouldn’t evoke that behavior. It’s getting at this core idea of the connectedness that we have as a community and as individuals. And we’re studying this in twins that are genetically identical or shared a womb if they’re fraternal. 

But I think this happens with spouses, with Children, parents and Children and, and, and you in a community, right? If you become parts of communities where you develop these deep friendships, you have this coalescing of mind and body eventually been lots of studies done in blue zone cities and countries in those areas. You know, Loma Linda, which is close to here. And I think San Diego is not too far off. There’s a lot of centenarians that live in these blue zone areas and all of the studies suggest the reason they live long is because they have these intense community relationships that they formed.

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing. I love that, you know, I remember back years ago where TM meditators would actually go to different parts of the world and meditate and crime would go down and so correlates with a lot of what you’re talking about or natural disasters that we’re starting to, you know, happen or were forecast would not be as bad or maybe went back out to sea like a hurricane or something like that. Really, really cool stuff. What is the impact on disease that you see a lot of people that are watching, you are have a chronic disease or have a loved one who has a chronic disease or a scary disease. What’s the impact on disease, the impact of meditation on disease?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So for about two years, we focused mostly on the healthy meditator, sort of on purpose, right? We wanted to know what does a healthy brain and body do when they get subjected to this intensive week long or this, you know, shorter advanced follow up experience, which is three days long. We have a very clear idea of what this healthy map is to then start looking at disease populations to help guide ways to, to intervene and move closer. One of the things we ran into is when we would solicit for these studies, I’ve never had this problem at UCSD is we had an abundance of people interested in being guinea pigs. I mean, here in an academic world, when you try to get people to recruit into a study, you have to pull teeth to get people involved in doing these studies because usually it’s scary and you have to put some, some medicine and that’s not tested. So we would solicit for studies and we get 7, 800 people volunteer Or a study where we could only pick 30, because we’re doing such a genotyping and which was great. 

I mean, we got some really cool data in those small people and that small group of people. But then when you go to these events and you’re running these assays, the 650 people that didn’t get picked would come up to you and be like, what do I need to do to get? I will give you my right arm, right kind of thing. And so we designed a study that launched initially in January of 2022. The literally the beginning of this year, we repeated that study just now last week in Orlando. And so the first we called it the quantum study. So quantum stands for the quest to analyze 1000 humans meditating. 

And so the concept was because we had such an overwhelming turnout of people who wanted to be studied. We designed a study that would take all comers, right? We would not exclude anyone from the study. If you wanted to be in it, you have to do two things. Absolutely had to wear a garment device or a Fitbit tracker for some device that allowed us to capture biometric data on you throughout the week long experience. And you had to answer questions on a health survey. We have hundreds of questions that we ask about what you think about this, that and the other. So the initial quantum we enrolled 978 subjects into that study. So if you round up got our question like meditating, in addition to those two things, we asked them to give us some bio specimen collections. And so we were a little worried about intruding right? And so we wanted a little sample before and after the event microbiome is a hot area, right? It’s a huge indicator of how the rest of the body is behaving. 

And a lot of think that people think that your gut may be your primary brain. The reason why you crave sugar, if you’re a diabetic is because your bacteria want to eat sugar and they release pheromones that then make your mind think about thoughts of sugar. So the gut became this really important thing we wanted to study. And then we wanted cheek scrapes. So we wanted cells from your body that we could do DNA tracking in to see if there were epigenetic changes and other things that happened. Happily, we got about 700 matched samples from people that participated in the study. So the large majority gave us the biological specimens as well. So then when we started dissecting what quantum meant, we now had about 150 healthy subjects, but we had almost 800 people that were sick, right? So they have diseases that are far spectrum. So we’ve got 18 diseases where we have at least 30 people or more Represented. So now we can ask some really big statistical questions around what’s happening to these 18 diseases, all by one intervention, right? And so sadly, as we expected, the top sort of diseases represented our anxiety, depression, PTSD They represent nearly 50% of quantum, which is probably on par with what the general population faces. I would imagine feeling people walking around have and it’s not all the time, it’s not chronic and some chronic depressive state. 

But all of us go through a time when we’re sad and not happy with the way things are, right? And so it was interesting to see that that dynamic existed in quantum. So now we have a way of looking at one intervention in all of those diseases. It’s a lot of data, right. We’ve got garment collected data over that week long. And then we continue, we can let everyone take their garment home. So then you could collect data over that entire year after they left. So we just stopped the study at nine months a couple weeks ago. And so we have a treasure trove of data to go through. The microbiome itself took about nine months to sequence all of that data. We just got the final batch of data in. 

So we’re starting to analyze all of that, The epigenetic stuff. We’re still waiting for funding to do that. It’s archived by freezer when that comes in. We’ll do that sequencing. So it’s gonna take a lot of money to get through it. But at the end of the day, one intervention, almost 50 diseases, we have 18 that are highly represented and we have another 25 or 30 that have under that 30 mark, but there’s some components, right? 25, some have one or two people that are represented by it. The one area that my lab has been focused on is cancer biology. And so we have lots of ways to study cancer in the lab. And so we took a slice of quantum and looked at cancer. And to see if there’s a potential for cancer to evolve or individuals with cancer devolve. 

It’s about 42 people in quantum had cancer. 31 of these were women with breast cancer and will be noticed in seven days is that they report almost a complete correction of their self perceived aspects of their health. They feel like they have more ability to do things and they have more ability to do things with their family. So their general health improved into this level of healthy and their ability to do things with their family moves into the level of what normal healthy people would be able to do. Then we went and looked at their microbiome and we matched it to healthy individuals in quantum that matched the cancer subjects by age and sex. And now you can compare apples to apples. And what was shocking was that a lot of their microbiome shifts to what looks more like a healthy individual’s microbiome in seven days, not by changing diet, but by simply meditating, we’re all eating the same food at these events. Just the perfect dish right, you’re focused at an event, the food is the same, the sleep cycles are essentially the same because everyone’s getting up at the same time to do medical bed, same time, the environment is all the same. You’re at a hotel or resort. So there’s really not much stimulation, that kind of thing. And so it’s a perfectly controlled environment to do these kinds of studies. So irrespective of food, you see this transformation in the microbiome and all you’ve done is you’ve gone into your nothing space for 35 hours. You closed your eyes and thought about

Tom McCarthy

Just for one week. Wow, that’s amazing.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I thought about nothing for, except for 30 hours and your microbiome changes to look more and more like a healthy individual. And we did what’s called meta genomic sequencing. So we can look at a lot of other features within the gut. And it turns out that when you look at some of the enzymes and things that are up and down regulated the gut of a cancer subject at the end of seven days is primed for Western therapeutics, right? And so you’re less resistant to chemotherapeutic agents and you have better anticancer, antimicrobial potential as well. Just seven days closing your eyes.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s amazing. Now, you, your first career, you specialized in pharmacology and in the heart. What impact have you found for meditators on the heart and helping keep that healthy or reverse heart disease? Or hypertension or whatever else was going on.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yeah. So we’re starting to look at that. One of the, so we followed up quantum one. So we’re now called quantum one point oh quantum two point oh just finished in Orlando. And one of those things that were very interested in his diabetes, so diabetes leads to a lot of cardiovascular dysfunction. So we followed about 25 individuals with type one and type two diabetes. And we’re going to be able to get some really interesting readouts on their glucose control and ultimately those sorts of things. We haven’t looked directly at heart diseases, but we’re starting to look more and more at diseases that have secondary complications that then lead to heart dysfunction. Want to see ultimately how it pans out. The nice thing about these kinds of studies is they’re all encompassing, right? We’re looking at over these two studies, almost 2000 people. They look at a lot of things, but then the downside is, it’s a lot of people and a lot of data take us forever to get through all of it. But once we do, we’re going to be able to make a lot of interesting sort of inferences about how meditation impacts virtually everything in human faces.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s amazing. And just a little bit to everybody. Stay tuned because I’m gonna give you a website that you can go to if you want to help further this research that Hemal’s doing, there’s an opportunity for you to help do that and I certainly want to. So we’ll mention that site just a little bit. You also in the conversation we had before we got on here, you said you’ve been doing some research in terms of energy transmission and this is the Global Energy Healing Summit. We have some energy healers that, that we have on here that actually send transmissions, including my co host who’s a Qi Gong master master Chunyi Lin Usually he does remote healing, he does on site healing, but talk to us about what you found with what evidence you found that you actually can transmit energy and impact other beings with your energy.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. So I guess there’s a couple of models we’ve been developing, right? So we’ve mostly been studying these individuals that go to the event and how they sort of change their own biology and their own lives and then collectively how they influence others around them. So these individuals change their blood makeup. And so the idea was, could you, is that information capture? Right? So when they reach the quantum or the field or whatever experience they have, does it lead to some change in biology that can be transferred to another living system? So we’ve taken blood out of these meditating individuals and we’ve put it on cells. 

And so what you can, what we noticed is that there’s an information capture So whatever these meditators created in that week, we can then take that blood, put it on a cancer cell and change the biology of that cancer cell. So we told that there is this information that’s created information that’s downloaded an information that can be transferred to another system. So then the question becomes, is that individual creating some information with their mental energy that’s leaving their body as well? And can you now transfer this to a living system? This is where it gets a little nuts. And my skepticism comes back in when you’re at these events. 

And when you hear stories in the community here, a lot of these things about these spontaneous healings where someone comes with cancer and then they walk away and the cancer is gone. Their physician can’t find any tumor or any sort of information that even existed as a human. This is amazing, right? You are emotionally and empathetically sort of happy for this individual. As a scientist, there’s this nagging part of your brain that says there’s no way, right? There’s no way. And so we invented an experiment in the lab. I said, I’m game. I’m open to sort of figuring this out. So we had a couple, we have a huge group in San Diego. Now, that’s part of the dispensing community is about 250 people that are part of our core group that does research with us in San Diego. And then we meet as a group once a week and meditate and do all kinds of amazing stuff as a larger collective. It’s never 200 people there, about 35, 40 people. It’s a good community to be a part of. And so we recruited some of these people to come into lab on campus. And what they do is they meditate around an incubator full of cancer cells and lo and behold after they leave and we measure some stuff in the cancer cells, they look very different than the same cancer cells that we have sitting in my lab at the VA hospital at the same time. 

And the only way I can describe it is that there’s some information that’s been transmitted from that human into that space that’s now engaging and interacting with this other living system that they’ve mentally focused on for half an hour hour that they’re doing this healing. And, and so as a scientist again, you’re scratching your head. It’s weird. Science is defining magic, right? I don’t know how else to describe what happens, but there’s magic created in that room. We will eventually have the tools to dissect what that is at the informational level. But I am convinced that there’s some information that’s created when you go into this meditative space that’s then transferable to other living systems. And we just need to figure out all of the pieces that go into that.

Tom McCarthy

I would love to be in your brain when you made some of these discoveries because it doesn’t make any sense based upon prior learnings. And all of a sudden, you’ve got all the greatness from your prior stuff, but you’ve got this whole new way of looking at life too, which is really powerful. I mean, thank you so much for doing all this great work because I know you’re already a busy guy and now you’ve added moron, but it’s been so beneficial for humanity and it’s gonna continue to make a big impact. So amazing, amazing. Let’s make sure everybody knows where they can go to help fund future research because this really is impactful. Like you’ve already hopefully sold people on the fact that if I meditate, I can be healthier, I can reverse disease, I can even send energy to other human beings potentially, right? So, and its research, this is research, this is not something even came in thinking probably was going to end up this way, right? And shocked you probably

Hemal Patel, PhD

Unbiased research, right? We don’t, when we collect these samples, their numbers in our labs, we don’t, there’s one person that has the code and it’s locked away, we don’t get to see what that is until we’re ready to dissect an analysis and, and really see what it is. So everything is done in a very blinded, controlled defined way. And so I trust it, right? And it’s, that’s how science should be done.

Tom McCarthy

Beautiful. So the site everybody can go to is innerscienceresearch.org. So I N N E R science and then research.org. And if you want to, if you want to help fund more research into meditation and energy, this is an incredible opportunity for you to do it. You just experienced Dr. Patel and you’ve heard him and, and I’m just so impressed with you. I’m so grateful that we have you on and I’m so grateful for the work you’re doing because I know again you only have so many hours in a day. And this, I think now I can kind of sense. It’s a little bit of a passion project for you to right.

Hemal Patel, PhD

It is now this is really an exciting area that I had no idea I would get into this. And we, when we started this and we had no idea, we were going to go this fast this quick and this deep into really defining the mind body connection.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, just a couple of years. Well, it’s beautiful. You have these groups that you can go study at the seminars and have controls. And so have you talked to your physician, brothers and sisters and mom and dad about all this yet? Or Not yet.

Hemal Patel, PhD

I mean, there’s still a lot of skepticism around this, but I think the fact that we’re doing real hard science to see if this is truly a yes or no kind of thing and, and if there’s a continuum, right? I don’t think it’s gonna work for everything. I think there’s a lot of things that’s going to work for. The other thing that I think these communities develop is that there’s the alternative path or the traditional Western path of, of how to treat disease. And this creates this, these silos that people live in. We can’t interact. 

And one of the things that we really want to do with this research and we’re starting to sort of intertwine all this is how do you marry? What, what most people have thought of as alternative with the Western path? Imagine? I mean, hopefully we can’t imagine. But if you had cancer, could you imagine if meditation and chemotherapy radiation, all those other Western ways of treating and curing disease that people through evidence based medicine coalesced together to then augment your potential to heal. One of the things that we’re starting to think about a lot is can you combine low doses of Western medicine kind of approaches with intensive meditative experiences that have very little toxicity, synergistic effect, right? Can you augment the effect of drugs? Meditating and I suspect you probably can.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s amazing. So what does the future hold for you? You talked a little bit about it probably just in trying to merge Western and and more non traditional medical practices. But what does the future hold? Like if we could generate a lot of money for you, what, what types of things would you be working on?

Hemal Patel, PhD

Yes. So the big question in this is what’s the information carrying, right? What is the individual create that then transfers this information to their body and then ultimately to other living systems, the people around them, the cells that they’re around their, their, their world that they’re exposed to. So that’s one big question and it’s going to keep us busy for years. We’ve, I’ve got hundreds of experiments were starting next year about looking at couple pairings and things like that. We’re doing a crazy study in Nashville called the pair study. So these studies done at Berkeley ages ago where you took an old mouse and you connected the circulatory system up to a, a young mouse, so young and old mouse. 

And there was some Hugh moral factor that got transferred where the young mouse transferred young nous to this old mouse. You don’t have to pair them physically together, circulatory systems. You just take the blood out of the young, transferred to the old and you get that benefit and where plasma and all these things come in. So one of the questions that I came up with was, can you do a mental para bios isc and you mentally pair with an individual that creates this and it happens at universities like this. There’s a reason around young people. There’s a reason why professors never retire and they never go there, constantly surrounded by young people. And we’re gonna run this study in Nashville at the week long event where we take young individuals. 

And I think the cut off is going to be probably 35 or younger and pair them with individuals that are not so young and then track to see if they spend the day together right there, all week together, eat together, meditate together, hang out together and, and really sort of bond during that day experience, the intensive experience. Do you then start seeing changes in biological markers of aging and other things than the older individuals? And then do you see cognitive changes in the younger individuals that make them more mature and decision making and other things? And we’ve got way to track all that we’re gonna launch at this event. And so this is really sort of this far off world of, of what really happens to the brain when it’s in this elevated state. How does it connect with other human beings? And how is it transformational to not only our body systems but the world in general?

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Do you have any research on the impact of meditation on anti aging?

Hemal Patel, PhD

We have a freezer full of samples where we can test that? Right. So that’s things were very one of the hot areas is epigenetics and there are, once we do the epigenetic analysis, we’ll be able to tell if there’s markers that look like the biological age is shifting down. I mean, I’ve talked to lots of people at these events that have participated in our studies. I had, I remember clearly this one subject was, had sort of this, pre dementia, right? He was starting to lose his ability to remember things and, and go through that process and his wife had noticed this as well. And after he came to an event Within three or four months, he’s like my mind feels like it’s 40 years younger. I don’t things anymore. I just feel like I’m more present and I can remember things and his wife noticed those differences as well. So like, totally, I think we see it and we’re gonna biologically in, in a couple of months, once we do some of those analyses,

Tom McCarthy

I love it. Thank you so much for being with us. You really very profound, your research. And I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing and, and I look forward to having more conversations with you in the future. Thank you so much. I know everybody’s benefit from this. Thank you so much for being on.

Hemal Patel, PhD

Sounds good.